Monday, July 17, 2017

Great Article About Roman Jesuit Magazines' Attack on American Catholics

It's written by Tim Stanley and published in The Catholic Herald. The Catholic Herald, along with EWTN, has been a staunch voice of orthodoxy in the current crisis, avoiding the excesses of Life Site News and Church Militant. (Not that I don't often agree with those two websites.)

Read it here

I especially like the concluding paragraph.

This is offensive. I suspect I know what’s behind it. If the essayists are allowed to engage in corny psychoanalysis, then permit me to do the same. Many Europeans and Latin Americans, ashamed of their countries’ dalliance with fascism, often try to implicate America in the same historical forces. But it’s more a more complex job than they think. There is such a thing as American fascism: slavery and segregation are its most obvious outward signs, and Catholics engaged in both alongside Protestants. But in the Thirties, democracy held out in the US in the way that it didn’t in Europe. And part of the reason for that was a history of resistance to state power and corporatism that is part of the DNA of America’s vibrant, violent, sometimes quite insane religious culture. American history is complicated. It defies lazy caricatures.

I've always been more friendly towards "the religious right" in America than most other Europeans, even when I was an agnostic. Back when I listened to heavy metal, all the songs attacking televangelists and fundamentalists irritated me, and seemed cheap.

To put it crudely, they have stones. They are willing to be counter-cultural. They are willing to be laughed at. That counts for an awful lot.

No comments:

Post a Comment